Beyond the Storm: How an Insurer Built a Sub-Hour Recovery Strategy

FAIRFIELD, NJ – July 07, 2026

For the 140,000 families and businesses relying on Oklahoma Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance (OKFB), the sound of a tornado siren is more than a distant threat; it’s a recurring reality. Operating in the heart of “Tornado Alley,” the insurer faces a unique and profound challenge: its services are most critically needed in the immediate aftermath of the very disasters that threaten to cripple its own operations. When a storm passes, policyholders need to file claims, receive checks, and begin rebuilding their lives. An offline insurer is no insurer at all.

This existential risk prompted a fundamental overhaul of the company's business continuity strategy. For years, the leadership at OKFB operated with a theoretical disaster recovery plan (DRP), but as one executive noted, theory offers little comfort when facing an F5 tornado. The board wanted guarantees, not just plans. They needed proof of resilience.

“When I joined OKFB, our executive leadership asked to see a disaster recovery plan,” said Lydia Kulman, Director of Information Systems at OKFB, in a recent statement. “They wanted assurance that we were testing regularly, running comprehensive audits and that we knew exactly what we would do in case of a disaster.”

This demand for quantifiable assurance led OKFB to a partnership with 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure provider. The subsequent transformation provides a compelling blueprint for how critical regional enterprises can move beyond paper-based plans to build a tested, resilient, and human-centered operational core.

From Eight Hours to Under an Hour

The core of OKFB's challenge was moving from passive data backup to active, proven recovery. The company’s original goal was to be able to restore critical systems within eight hours of a catastrophic event—a standard, if unambitious, target. However, the partnership with 11:11 Systems enabled a dramatic leap in capability, leveraging a suite of managed services to create a functional “hot site” strategy.

By implementing 11:11’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for Zerto, OKFB effectively created a live, continuously updated mirror of its essential IT infrastructure. Unlike traditional backups that occur at set intervals, Zerto’s technology uses continuous data protection (CDP). This means data is replicated in near real-time, with changes logged in a journal. The practical benefit is a Recovery Point Objective (RPO)—the measure of potential data loss—of mere seconds, not hours. For an insurer processing claims and payments, this virtually eliminates the risk of losing critical transaction data during a failover.

More impressive, however, was the impact on the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)—the time it takes to get systems back online. Through regular, managed testing, OKFB validated that it could recover its entire critical application stack in just under one hour. This wasn't a theoretical calculation; it was a proven result achieved through drills managed by 11:11’s experts. This is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a disaster recovery capability. The former is a document; the latter is a demonstrated, muscle-memory function of the organization.

“With 11:11 Systems, I can confidently guarantee those things and more,” Kulman affirmed, highlighting the shift from uncertainty to executive confidence. This confidence is built on the foundation of managed testing, which moves DR from a dreaded, disruptive annual event to a routine, non-disruptive validation process.

Solving the Connectivity Conundrum

Resilience in the modern era is not solely about data recovery; it’s about connectivity. An application stack restored in a cloud environment is useless if users and other systems can't securely access it. OKFB’s journey illustrates this dual challenge perfectly. The company’s digital transformation was complicated when a key third-party technology vendor mandated a shift in its connectivity model, requiring a direct and secure connection to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

For a regional insurer's IT department, designing and implementing a solution like AWS Direct Connect can be a significant undertaking, diverting resources from core business functions. Direct Connect provides a private, dedicated network link to the AWS cloud, bypassing the public internet to offer greater security, reliability, and consistent bandwidth. While powerful, it involves coordinating with network carriers, managing physical hardware, and navigating complex cloud networking configurations.

This is where the managed services model again proved its value. 11:11 Systems, an AWS Direct Connect Delivery Partner, handled the entire implementation through its Managed Connectivity offering. This allowed OKFB to gain the security and performance benefits of a private cloud connection without shouldering the implementation and management burden. The solution provided a direct, secure, and resilient pathway to the cloud, ensuring that even if local infrastructure in Oklahoma City were compromised, the company's data and applications would remain accessible and functional from its recovery environment.

A New Paradigm for Insuring the Insurers

The OKFB case study is more than a story of one company’s success; it signals a broader shift in how essential regional businesses must approach operational risk. In an era of escalating climate-related events and complex supply chains, insurers, community banks, and healthcare providers can no longer afford to self-insure their own technological resilience. The expertise and scale required to build and maintain a truly robust, multi-cloud, and regularly tested recovery infrastructure are immense.

As homeowners in Oklahoma see insurance premiums surge—up 42% between 2018 and 2023 due to severe storm risks—the operational efficiency and reliability of their insurers become paramount. By outsourcing the complex mechanics of disaster recovery and cloud connectivity to a specialist like 11:11 Systems, OKFB is not just mitigating risk; it is strategically investing in its ability to serve its members when it matters most.

This model of partnership allows companies to focus on their core mission while leveraging world-class infrastructure and expertise. It transforms business continuity from a capital-intensive, in-house cost center into a predictable, managed operational expense. For businesses operating on the front lines of climate change and technological disruption, this shift from simply having a plan to having a proven, managed capability is the ultimate form of insurance.